The Education University of Hong Kong Corpus Linguistics Team Won the Silver Award of the 47th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva

Dr Angel Ma Qing and her colleagues from the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies won the Silver Medal of the 47th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva with their Knowledge Transfer project “Education Linguistics 2.0 - The Use of Corpora in Language Teaching”.

Launched in 1973, the International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva (http://inventions-geneva.ch/en/home/) is one of the most important invention exhibitions in the world. The team of The Education University of Hong Kong Corpus Linguistics (team) was selected from among 1,000 new inventions and products through a rigorous selection process in April 2019.

The team has strived hard to promote an innovative corpus-based language pedagogy that brings substantial education value to school teachers. Through the application of corpus resources and research tools to the classroom setting, this innovative pedagogical approach facilitates data-driven learning in the classrooms, where students can learn through self-initiated learning from authentic language examples. In the project series, the team has organised a total of 14 workshops in both Hong Kong and mainland China. The workshop series have attracted 450 participants from more than 100 schools in Hong Kong and mainland China, including three principals, four teaching researchers of English and more than 30 English panel heads or chairs from these schools. This technology-driven approach and innovative teaching methods introduced in the project have not only benefited language teachers who attended the workshops, but also inspired both pre-service and in-service teachers world-wide through the dissemination of the knowledge on the official website of the project(http://corpus.eduhk.hk/cap/). This website is built to showcase an abundant inventory of corpus resources, to demonstrate corpus-based teaching materials, to provide theoretical knowledge for designing corpus-based learning and teaching activities, so as to facilitate the knowledge transfer of corpus linguistics to the teaching community of Hong Kong and mainland China, in the long run.

In the future, the team will continue their efforts in promoting this corpus-based pedagogy approach to the school teachers of Hong Kong and mainland China, especially in cities in the Greater Bay Area to gain some significant social impact.

Team Members Drs Wang Lixun and Angel Ma with the workshop participants

Team Members visiting the Houde Academy in Shenzhen

Team Members visiting the Houde Academy in Shenzhen